Visual Arts/Aidan Dunne: Although it chiefly employs the idiom of comic-book illustration, Stephen Brandes's Klutz Paradiso is a big show that features work on a surprisingly large scale.

Brandes has taken the compact form of the black-and-white graphic image and extended it across huge expanses in a narratively ambitious venture. Comics with novelistic ambitions are not unprecedented. There have been several graphic novels in the recent past, and Brandes's work can clearly be seen in relation to some of them. Certainly he is aiming to produce a hybrid form, mingling elements from fine art and popular culture, and there is a sense of overall coherence to what he has done.

His project had its beginnings in sketchbook drawings made during a journey that was something of a personal pilgrimage for him.

In 1999, he set out to follow in his grandmother's footsteps from Romania to England. While still a young woman, she and her entire family fled their home after she had lashed out at a militiaman who had come to take forced possession of their timberyard on the Romanian-Ukraine border. Her path took her across Europe to Hamburg.

Sailing from Hamburg, she met a young man. "They docked in Hull and married in Leeds," as Brandes recounts it. But one day, "four children later", her husband went out to buy a packet of cigarettes and never came back. "They think he went to Dublin."

While broadly true, this story is also partly mythical, in that over time Brandes himself filled in the gaps. Yet truth can be stranger than fiction: "I have since discovered that my grandmother only had one leg - the other was ceramic." He did not set out to provide a narrative account of his own or his grandmother's journey, and his work is as much informed by his own wider experiences and observations, from growing up in Wolverhampton to living in contemporary, Celtic Tiger Ireland. His work both parallels and is a commentary on all this, "a perpetually developing fictional world".

Brandes's world is an engagingly shambolic realm. He engenders a sense of populations in transit, of the tenuous nature of community and the oddness of much human endeavour. Domesticity entails industry and both produce waste: vast mountains of the stuff in several of the images. Rather than progress there is a haphazard, aimless sprawling.

His large-scale pieces are drawn and painted on vinyl or, as it is colloquially known, lino. The patterns imprinted on the lino are emblematic of domestic and social aspirations. But it's a deceptive material, offering cheap if functional imitations of more expensive surfaces. The reasonable desire for comfort and security leads to the bland conformity of the suburbs. In a way, Brandes restores the awareness of drama and history that are effectively hidden beneath the calm uniformity of suburbia.

Trees - family trees - sprout from the couch in Chelmarch Suite as it is transformed into a vast, troubled terrain. If the dominant note is sardonic and a bit sceptical, there is at the same time real emotional range in the work. A dreamy wistfulness informs several of the small paintings, for example, and there is a reflective, meditative quality to practically everything in the show, partly deriving, perhaps, from the incredible intricacy of the images.

Brandes acknowledges the influence of underground comics, and Robert Crumb is surely top of the list. So is Philip Guston, whose late paintings also suggest the impact of Crumb, hailed as a latter-day Breughel by no less than Robert Hughes. Breughel certainly comes to mind in relation to Brandes's rambling, panoramic compositions, packed with layers of detail and incident.

Given that his achievement is substantial (his paintings in themselves would make a fine show), and that pretty much everything we see rewards close attention, it may seem churlish to suggest there may be too much on view, even given the gallery's formidable space. That's enough vinyl drawings, one is inclined to feel by journey's end. Which is, though, a minor complaint.

In the Ashford Gallery, The Obsessive Garden, curated by Mark St John Ellis, marshals work by five artists based in Birmingham. There is a connection between this fact and their presence in the Royal Hibernian Academy. St John Ellis notes that the RHA's first president, the landscape painter William Ashford, was born in Birmingham. While their work is diverse, all the artists take an existing object - postcards, passport photos, jigsaws, pieces of wood, glass, mirrors and seashells - and incorporate or remake them in an artwork.

Probably most strikingly, Pamina Stewart flirts with kitsch by collecting seashells and making sculptural animals with them, on a disconcertingly large scale. Her lizard is particularly effective. In fact these amazing creations, which recall the work John Kindness, stem from the artist's collection of seaside souvenirs. In a comparable vein, Ian Skoyles collects jigsaws and then cunningly combines several different puzzles in one complete image, successfully lulling our eyes into a false sense of security before making us look again. It's a simple idea, but it is very effective.

Carl Jaycock's Darwin and Jack and Trying to Find My Ancestors is ingenious, but to what end it's hard to say. Hundreds of strips of passport photographs have been engineered to make two adjoining composite images in the manner, most infamously, of Marcus Harvey's 1995 painting of Myra Hindley.

Jaycock is nothing like as controversial. One of his images is based on a well-known portrait of Charles Darwin, the other is a Union Jack. Jaycock is presumably referring to the way Darwin's theory of natural selection was co-opted to justify theories of racial superiority, and arguably reinforced the colonial mindset. Perhaps the implication is that underlying both Darwin the individual and Britain itself there is diversity on both historical and genetic levels.

Karen Trusselle set up interesting visual quandaries, prompting us to question how we read what we are looking at by juxtaposing objects, photographs, paintings and reflections of any or all of them. Faced with one of her composite pieces, we have to check and re-check to establish what's what, but the process extends indefinitely and engagingly.

Perhaps the most conventional artist is painter Graham Chorlton, whose work is based on postcards. He uses elements of photographic language with great flair and inventiveness. Although his sources are second-hand, he has a very distinctive, consistent voice.

Reviewed

Klutz Paradiso Stephen Brandes, Royal Hibernian Academy Gallagher Gallery until Aug 27 (01-6612558)

The Obsessive Garden, curated by Mark St John Ellis, Ashford Gallery, Royal Hibernian Academy until Aug 31 (01-6617286)